Grave Goods (16 page)

Mansur and Adelia joined them, and Adelia put her question to the abbot.

“In the name of God,” Brother Aelwyn said furiously, appealing to his superior, “are we to be pestered even on our way to holy offices?”

“Answer her, Aelwyn,” his abbot told him.

The monk turned to Adelia. “Yes, a fissure was opened by the earthquake, what of it?”

“Twenty years ago?”

“That was when the earthquake occurred, the day after Saint Stephen’s Day, to be exact, if it’s any business of yours, mistress.”

“Between the pyramids, was it?”

“Yes.”

“And how deep was it?”

“Deep, deep, woman. We didn’t bother to measure it, we had other things on our mind.
Deep.
It closed itself the next day, in any case.”

“Were you here, then?” Adelia persisted.

She had exhausted Brother Aelwyn’s small store of patience, and it was Brother James who answered excitedly, “We were all here then, were we not, my brothers? Oh, no, Abbot, you weren’t, were you? You came to us later. I thought the Last Hour was on us, God have mercy.” Tears came to his eyes as he looked round the blackened hill. “And now it has.”

Abbot Sigward put his arm round James’s shoulders. “With the Lord’s grace, Glastonbury will rise again, my son. Let us go to our prayers.” He nodded at Adelia, and led his flock toward the ruined church.

Gyltha and Allie headed up the hill.

“What is this about a fissure?” Mansur asked.

“We’ll have to see,” Adelia said.

She ushered him into the hut and pointed at the coffin lying between the two covered catafalques. “Look at that. It’s in fairly good condition still, but they had to dig sixteen feet down to find it, in which case it must be very old, as old as anything in the pit. Yet it hasn’t crumbled. You said there were other coffins down there, and I want to compare this one with those. I think we might be able to get a rough, very rough, dating from the state of the wood.”

“And if this one turns out to be newer than the others?”

Adelia grinned at him. “Then it could only have been put sixteen feet down when the fissure opened, twenty years ago.”

“And is therefore not Arthur’s.”

“No.”

Mansur sucked his teeth. “That will not please the monks—nor the king.”

And all at once, Adelia didn’t
want
to find out how old this coffin was, nor to deny the title of Arthur and Guinevere to those poor bones.

This was not merely a matter of forensics; it had become
massive;
it crushed her. A great abbey’s future, those faithful men singing out there, the rebuilding of an entire town, the welfare of an inn, the dream of so many—these expectations rested with her decision.

Oh, God, don’t put this on me. I don’t want to be hope’s executioner.

But she was Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, medica of the Salerno School, and if she was not a seeker after truth, she was nothing.

She gritted her teeth and said, “Let’s get to it.”

There was no point in sawing a piece off the coffin until she had wood to compare it with. The two of them left the hut and dodged between the tumbled stone of the church as they crossed the once-great nave where, in what had been the choir, the monks were chanting Psalm 119.

“My soul melteth for heaviness; strengthen thou me according to thy word.
Remove from me the way of lying and grant me thy law in graciousness.”

Adelia couldn’t look at them.

The huge section of wall that still stood between the church and its graveyard lessened the sound of the monks’ voices, replacing
it with the hum of bees. Perhaps because she was expecting them now, the two pyramids and the mountain of earth between them looked less monstrous than they had.

Mansur began unwinding a rope that had been round his waist, concealed by his robe. “I asked the man Godwyn for it,” he said. “I suspect those steps into the pit, they are beginning to crumble.”

Adelia smiled at him. He’d brought it because he knew that this time she would insist on going down the hole with him.

Gyltha and Allie were returning from the hill. “Too hot, bor,” Gyltha said. “I’m taking madam home afore she frizzles.”

“How’s Polycarp?” Adelia asked Allie.

Her daughter was red-cheeked with heat and pleasure. “Better. Even Brother Peter said he thought he was better, though he didn’t like saying it, did he, Gyltha? Rude man, but he likes Polycarp.”

“And I asked the miserable bugg …” Gyltha said, then, remembering Allie’s presence, started again; “I asked un about the fissure. He were only a lad then, but he reckons the hole was sixteen, seventeen foot deep afore it closed up.”

She looked suspiciously at Mansur, who was tying his rope around one of the pyramids, and then at the mound of earth that was casting a shadow over the pit beside it. “You two ain’t thinking of going down that damn great hole, I hope. Nasty places, holes. Them’s where demons come from.”

“Oh, get on home. Mansur’s made sure we’ll be safe.” Lovingly, Adelia watched them go, one tall, one short, like two ill-assorted walking mushrooms in their wide hats.

Mansur threw the free end of the rope down the pit, but even now he wanted her to stay at the top. “It is not enjoyable down there.”

“You managed, so I can.” She wanted to see for herself and, once he had climbed down, she followed him.

The steps down the side of the pit
were
beginning to crumble, but they had been well cut and, as long as she went down backward, holding on to the rope, feeling for the next with first one foot and then the other, they bore her weight well enough.

The great mound of displaced earth above took away most of the light. The smell of soil was overlaid by a less pleasurable reek. Bits of bone showed white-gray against the pit’s sides; wood was smudges of brown.

She was descending into the past, through centuries, passing the level in which lay the remains of Glastonbury’s great abbots. Down, down, past the bones of men who’d served the formidable Saint Dunstan. Another stratum and she had reached the resting place of monks who’d defied invasions by the Vikings and saved the literacy of Christianity from their raids.

“There, God leading them, they found an old church built, as ’twas said, by the hands of Christ’s disciples, and prepared by God Himself for the salvation of souls, which church the Heavenly Builder Himself showed to be consecrated by many miraculous deeds, and many mysteries of healing.”

So William of Malmesbury, the historian, had written.

And now, as Adelia’s feet touched the bottom of the pit, who knew whether she was now standing in the entombment of those early disciples themselves, one of them Joseph of Arimathea, whose hands had lifted the body of Jesus from the Cross.

She was shivering.

Mansur’s voice came through the gloom. “Can you see anything of a coffin?”

They were facing away from each other, far enough not to be touching, but the smell of the herbs that the Arab kept his robes
in offset the reek in which the two of them stood, and she was glad he was there.

“I think I can,” she said. There was just enough light to see a slight difference in the blackness of earth in front of her. She put out her hand and felt a protrusion that was harder than the soil around it, though, as she pulled it out, only a small section came away from whatever it had been attached to. “Can you see any more? It would be as well to have more than one piece.”

Lord, this was a terrible place to be.

To comfort herself that there was still fresh air and life above them, she looked upward—and saw the light of day blotted out as earth came sweeping down the pit to bury them.

I
T CAME AND IT CAME
, a landslide of soil pouring down onto her head, into her eyes, rising to fill the space she stood in.

There was a constriction round her waist; Mansur was holding her up, shouting, “Where’s the rope? Find the rope.”

Desperately, she groped for it. “It’s not here.”

And then it was—all of it, loose, brushing her face as it slithered downward amid the falling earth. It had come away. It draped itself over her.

The avalanche stopped. Adelia blinked the muck out of her eyes. “Phew. Oh, dear God, that was close. The mound up on top tipped over.”

She looked down and saw that Mansur had been engulfed almost up to his shoulders; his elbows were at ear level as he continued to hold her above the debris. He was panting from the strain on his arms. “The steps, I can’t see.” Her body was obstructing his view.

She looked for the steps; they were behind her.

Then a shadow blocked out the light above and black earth engulfed
her again, coming down in rhythmic, vicious plunges. They were being buried alive.

“Help us.”
Screaming, she scrabbled at the side of the pit like a spider trying for a hold against a sudden rush of rain.
“Help us, God help us.”

The coffin lid was closing on them.

She heard Mansur start to shout and then choke as earth entered his mouth. But still he held her up.

She shouted for him.
“No.”
And tried kicking out a space round his head so that he could breathe, but her legs could move only a few inches against the constraining earth. His grip weakened and she fell sideways, her lower body pinioned against his shoulders.

Wrenching her back, she squirmed so that she could get to him. One of his hands was still visible, its fingers outstretched. There was a patch of white, the top of his headdress, and she began digging round it, frantic, yelling, not knowing she was yelling, scooping earth, baling it away from that beloved face. “No,
no, no!”

He was sinking, dear Christ, he was sinking, they were both sinking, and she couldn’t dig fast enough against the soil that trickled through her hands.

She felt her body arch as something tugged at the waist of her gown and began dragging her up. She thrashed against it; Mansur was choking; he must breathe—O God in Heaven, let her help him to breathe.

A voice shouted, “Keep still, damn you. I’ll pull you up.”

“
No
. Mansur. Mansur’s dying.”

“I can’t get to him until you’re out of the way, you stupid bitch. Keep still.”

She was too terrified to put a name to it, but it was a voice she’d once known, a loved voice she’d trusted. Even so, letting herself dangle as she was pulled upward was the most unwilling thing
she’d ever done. Tears poured out of her eyes, and she kept screaming for Mansur.

The hand attached to her was in turn attached to a man with his feet planted on one of the steps. His other hand was holding that of a second man lying down on the pit edge, his arm extended as far as it would go.

She was hauled in like a fish that flapped in the sunlight trying to return to water. “Mansur, Mansur. It’s Mansur down there.”

“I’m getting him, aren’t I?” The snapping voice, unacknowledged but still familiar, addressed itself elsewhere. “Jesus, she’s got a rope round her. Get it off her quick.”

It took time, it took
time.
She was disentangled from the rope, knots were tied, things were done, but she was blind to everything except the thought of nostrils and throat blocked with soil; he’d be unconscious by now, beyond recovery in … how long, how long to suffocate?

She crawled to the edge and saw his fingers, a little picket fence sticking out of the blackness. Saw a hand grasp them. Heard the voice: “Pull.
Again.
Christ, I can’t get purchase.”

More time. A scrabbling as the rescuer heaved earth from round Mansur’s head and shoulders. One arm was free. A rope was looped round it. “Now
pull,
Walt, pull as you’ve never fucking pulled.”

The man at the top pulled, the man in the middle pulled, and slowly, like Lazarus from the dead, Mansur rose from the pit.

They laid him on the sweetgrass. He wasn’t breathing. Adelia fell on him, picking soil from his nostrils. She cleared his mouth and then puffed her own breath into it.

And felt his chest rise and fall. And crouched back on her knees to give thanks in three languages, to God, to Allah, to her foster father’s Jehovah, for the grace they had accorded her in letting this man live.

Somebody had fetched a ewer of water, and she used it to wash the rest of the earth from the Arab’s face and head. His kaffiyeh had come off in the struggle to leave the pit, and she, who had never seen him bareheaded, saw that he was becoming bald.

“His headdress,” she said. “Find his headdress.” He would be shamed without it; she couldn’t have him shamed.

Somehow it was produced. Shaking the earth from it and tenderly raising his head, she put it on him, arranging its folds as he would want.

He opened his eyes and she looked into them. “Do you know who I am, dear friend?”

“My sun and my moon,” he said.

She sat back and rested against the man who knelt behind her.

Time resumed. There was warmth and the smell of wildflowers and, above, a sky as blue as sailors’ trousers, the hum of bees, and—oh, God, how strange—the sound of plainsong coming from the ruins of a church where, unknowing, impervious holy men still celebrated the third hour of daylight, allowing the six-note hexagons of their song to bring order back to a universe in which, for her, there had been chaos.

Her eyes cleared. A little way away, a young man held the reins of three horses—he had a fluttering peregrine on his arm and was trying to soothe it. Looming over her with concern was a face she recognized. She smiled at Walt, an old friend, groom to the diocese of Saint Albans.

He smiled back. “A near thing, mistress.”

She rubbed the back of her head against the chest of the man holding her. “Hello, Rowley,” she said.

There was a huff of angry breath against her hair. “Don’t you hello me. In the name of Christ, how many more times have I got to rescue you from a pit? What in hell were you doing down there?”